Harry Potter and the class of 1997: how our culture has changed since J. K. Rowling's boy wizard first appeared

View full sizeAnna ScattarellaThe new Harry Potter movie drew a huge crowd Thursday night to Bridgeport Village, where 12 different showtimes starting at midnight accommodated four separate long lines.

The first British edition of the first "Harry Potter" novel; only 1000 were printed.

June 30, 1997.

In Hong Kong, preparations are being made by the British government to cede the colony to China the following day. In Washington, a Democratic President and Republican Congress are fighting over tax increases and spending cuts. In Iraq, United Nations weapons inspectors spar with Saddam Hussein’s recalcitrant government. In Las Vegas, Mike Tyson is being pilloried after having bitten off a chunk of Evander Holyfield’s ear during a fight the day before.

Gas costs $1.40 a gallon, a movie ticket about $4.50. The number one film at the US boxoffice is Disney’s animated “Hercules,” “I’ll Be Missing You” by Puff Daddy is on top of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, and “Seinfeld” is the nation’s favorite TV show.

All of that can be easily learned by looking at any of that day’s newspapers.

But the biggest event of the day -- in both cultural and economic terms -- was noted in almost none of them.

In England, a boy was born: a bespectacled orphan of 11 years of age with a plain name and an unusual scar and a big future that nobody could remotely suspect. “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” was released inauspiciously on June 30, 1997 by Bloomsbury Publishing, which had acquired the manuscript for 1500 British pounds (about $2400) from its author, Joanne Rowling, an unemployed teacher, unpublished writer, and depressed single mom living in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Today, Rowling is a billionaire on the strength of her imagination, and “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2,” the eighth feature-length movie adaptation of them, appears in theaters all over the world.

A journey that began with a relatively muted act of publishing comes to an end with a massively anticipated film opening. And we have a chance to look back to 1997 and the culture that gave birth to Harry Potter, an era that ought still to be fresh in the memory but is, in some ways, so remote and distant as to be unrecognizable.

View full sizeJ. K. Rowling presents the final "Harry Potter" novel in 2007.

To say that “Harry Potter” is a cultural phenomenon is like calling the Rock of Gibraltar a stone. Rowling eventually wrote seven “Potter” novels that would sell more than 450 million copies in 67 languages. The seven “Potter” films already in release have taken in more than $6 billion at the global boxoffice. Throw in toys, games, Halloween costumes, candy, DVDs, collectables and even a theme park, and you’re describing an empire that has been valued at $15 billion.

For all that, though, even a small success for “Harry Potter” was hardly guaranteed 14 years ago. Afraid that boys might avoid a book written by a woman, her publishers asked Rowling to use a gender-concealing pseudonym; echoing the then-champ of kid’s fantasy lit, R. L. Stine, she signed her work J. K. Rowling. Even still, Bloomsbury weren’t overly keen: They printed a mere 1000 copies and told Rowling to get a day job because she wasn’t likely to make a living writing children’s books.

Indeed, in his first months on Earth, Harry Potter wasn’t only a dark horse, he wasn’t even England’s hottest new face. That might have been the youthful Tony Blair, who was elected Prime Minister just the month before, giving the Labour Party its first government in 17 years. It might have been the Spice Girls, whose first album had been released in the winter and was topping sales charts all over the world. In fact, in a way it might even have been Diana, Princess of Wales still a fashion, lifestyle, and philanthropy icon despite being newly divorced from Prince Charles.

To be young and fresh and English was the rage in 1997, more so than at any time since the Swinging London of the 1960s. In March, the American magazine Vanity Fair jealously trumpeted the rise of “Cool Britannia,” and English fashion designers, architects, pop bands, artists, and even chefs (yes, chefs) were being celebrated -- and employed -- globally. London was a boomtown; the British pop and club scenes were being imitated everywhere; Anglophilia was good style and good business.

Part of what made the UK look so sexy to American eyes 14 years ago was that 1997 was a time when it still felt relatively new to be connected immediately to the wider world. In fact, the most shocking difference between the day Harry Potter was born and today comes when you consider the technologies of two eras a mere 14 years apart.

Some 55 million Americans had cell phones in 1997, compared to nearly 280 million today. And the internet was similarly unfamiliar. About 22 percent of Americans had access to the world wide web 14 years ago, and then mostly at work; today, more than 80 percent of Americans are wired, and mostly at home. Firing up machines that ran Windows 95 or Mac OS 8, those users of 1997 could choose among approximately 1 million web sites on the internet (compared to 160 million today). But none of them was called Google or Facebook or Twitter or YouTube: they didn’t exist yet.

If technology has changed, the movies that you watch on it haven’t -- much. The top-grossing films of early 1997 included the Special Edition rereleases of the original “Star Wars” films, the Jim Carrey comedy “Liar, Liar,” and “The Lost World: Jurassic Park.” Eventually, the year would produce such hits as “Men in Black,” “Air Force One,” “Good Will Hunting,” “As Good As It Gets,” and the blockbuster “Titanic,” which would hold the all-time boxoffice gross record for more than a decade.

But
it was a year of quality smaller films, as well, with such memorable titles as
"L. A. Confidential," "The Full Monty," "Boogie Nights," "Jackie Browne," "Fast,
Cheap and Out of Control," "Lost Highway" and "Grosse Pointe Blank." It’s a fairly diverse list, but it doesn’t seem alien or old-fashioned; the world and people may have changed, but big-money moviemaking is pretty much the same.

For a variety of reasons, none of those 1997 film debuts has had the legs of “Harry Potter.” Indeed, wherever you look in the pop culture landscape of that year, almost all of the significant achievers of that time have either vanished entirely or shrunk to far smaller size than they once enjoyed.

Alongside “Seinfeld” in the Nielsen ratings were such shows as “E. R.,” “Friends,” “Suddenly Susan,” “The Naked Truth,” and “Veronica’s Closet”: all gone. The best new TV shows of the year are mostly gone as
well: "Ally McBeal," "Buffy the Vampire
Slayer," "King of the Hill," "Just Shoot Me," "The Practice."

And it's the same story on the pop charts: Joining the Spice Girls and Puff Daddy with smash hits were such acts as Hanson (“MMMBop”), Meredith Brooks (“Bitch”), Chumbawumba (“Tubthumping”), Sugar Ray (“Fly”), and The Wallflowers (“One Headlight”).

Like Puff Daddy, whose “I’ll Be Missing You” memorialized his friend the Notorious B. I. G., who was killed in March, Elton John had a global hit with a version of his “Candle in the Wind” in rewritten in honor of Princess Diana after her August 31 death. The year also took from us such diverse notables as James Stewart, Robert Mitchum, Allen Ginsburg, Jacques Cousteau, Gianni Versace, Mother Theresa, John Denver, Charles Kuralt, Chris Farley and Jeff Buckley.

But 1997 wasn’t steeped in loss. It yielded “Harry Potter,” remember, as well as two other cultural franchises that remain new and vital today -- albeit with none of Harry Potter’s old-fashioned hominess or sense of propriety.

The first episode of TV’s iconoclastic “South Park” aired in 1997, giving the world a phenomenon that has branched out into film and videogames and even, in a manner, onto Broadway, where the show’s creators are now Tony-winners for “The Book of Mormon.”

The other big debut of the year was “Grand Theft Auto,” the (British-made!) videogame that brought new levels of narration, exploration, role-playing and, yes, violence, drug use and sexual activity to gaming; it has birthed three sequels and countless imitators and is widely considered to be among the most influential game titles ever created.

Other than their shared birth year, though, “South Park” and “Grand Theft Auto” form a vivid contrast to the world that Jo Rowling conceived. While all three can be said to deal in the theme of good vs. evil, only in the Potter-verse, is the battle for supremacy between the two waged unironically and with a sense of real stakes. (And, arguably, it’s the only one of the three in which the audience or user is unmistakably on the side of good....)

More crucially, the people in the “Harry Potter” books and films feel like people, even when they are engaged in make-believe of varying degrees of cleverness and/or silliness. Harry Potter and his friends laugh and cry and bleed and yearn and suffer and strive. They remind us of us.

In contrast, the characters in “South Park,” which virtually defines irreverence, are literally and metaphysically two-dimensional. And in “Grand Theft Auto,” which is decried in some quarters as a virtual training tool for sociopathy, humans are mere objects to abuse, exploit, evade and ignore -- ducks in an uber-cool shooting gallery.

This isn’t to say that any of them is better than any other. “South Park” and “Grand Theft Auto” have lasted so long and seeped so widely into the world because they are made with fine craft, because they have continued to expand and improve as franchises, and because, whether you care to admit it or not, they tap into some ordinary needs and comforts and wishes and curiosities of ordinary people. They are, in a phrase, deeply human.

And the same is true of Rowling’s “Harry Potter” story. The growth of the “Potter” empire from page to screen to flume ride may be a modern phenomenon. But the seed at the heart of the series, the essence of the saga, the thing that hooked so many ardent followers, is something easily and eternally recognizable: the need to learn one’s true identity, to confront one’s limits and fears, to choose a path for one’s life and follow it despite setbacks.

“Harry Potter” may have come out of nowhere. But the world has embraced him, even if it didn’t do so right away, because it recognizes him as a neighbor, son, brother, friend or, indeed, as itself. He may have been born 14 years ago an unloved, unheralded orphan. Today, though, he has a home wherever people read books or watch movies or merely harbor fantasies of being able to make magic -- everywhere, in short, on Earth.